


47b Idumea / 277 Antioch

by fashionablesnider



Category: Outlast (Video Games)
Genre: Mood Swings About One's Own Impending Death, One Shot, Religious Themes, Retelling, Selective Mute Waylon, Slightly Alternate Ending, Suicidal Thoughts, Walrider Miles Upshur, faith - Freeform, introspective
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-27
Updated: 2018-02-27
Packaged: 2019-03-24 17:11:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,514
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13815702
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fashionablesnider/pseuds/fashionablesnider
Summary: “I've never prayed in my life, Lisa, but if some small-minded interventionist god is listening, kill Jeremy Blaire before I die. Sanity and avarice. There's no pain he doesn't deserve.”Waylon Park meets his Deus ex machina.





	47b Idumea / 277 Antioch

Waylon Park limps through Administration feeling something akin to faith. The room is deathly quiet, full of blood puddles and stains, and a gentle light streaming into the building from the open double doors at the entrance. Light at the end of one sticky gore-slicked tunnel he’s been wading through for what feels like days. If Waylon had a different kind of faith, he might instead draw a comparison to a light before death, heaven’s gates opening up, ending this misery at last. Fresh air. Daylight. How he’ll ever wash the stink of corpse-flesh, rape and corporate abuse from his skin he doesn’t know, but he has faith that he can make it through those doors. Mount Massive is the feeble, dying heart of this beast – all he has to do is leave.

Jeremy Blaire in the doorway, curled up in pain, holding his bleeding side. Waylon feels no pity. The part of him still holding tight to pre-slaughter human decency and compassion tells him he _should_ , but he fails to muster up even a sliver of emotion for the man. Not even hatred anymore; he’s too exhausted to spare the energy.

Blaire’s talking to him. Waylon’s moving in a single-minded haze, barely absorbing the words. All he thinks is that he’s likely the last cognizant human being Blaire will ever see. His hobble does not falter.

Then, as if by trip wire, Blaire springs on him. At first he thinks he’s been punched in the stomach.

“Fucking _die_ already.”

The knife goes in and out. Squelch and rip. Only when Waylon sees it, bloody in Blaire’s hands, does he realise.

The knife goes in and the faith leaks out. And it is Waylon Park, not his attacker, who digs his thumbs into the hole and claws it open. Now the faith comes spilling. Whatever thinning part of him was holding it in, it bursts all at once; his head swirls as it runs rapid through hopeless, miserable thoughts of never going to leave, never meant to survive, dying here, being killed here, don’t want to be murdered, _I want to die—_

Faith, diluted by blood and pus and fluid death wish. Like acid, eating at him, since he left the engine. Never be the same. There’s a reason hanged men and falling impacts gave him pause. Underneath pure survival instinct of MOVE-RUN-ESCAPE he just wishes for an ending. He needs to go home.

He wants to fucking die.

Collapsed on the ground with all his desire to preserve flushed clean out – how convenient for Mr. Blaire – Waylon holds his screaming belly and crawls away only from the expectation of pain. The ceiling might as well cave in on them both, a means to the same end. To see this place reduced to rubble. If only. Let Murkoff’s infection rot and fester in its own filth.

Jeremy Blaire stands freely above him now, if shaky on his feet – one last burst of human effort for the death of Waylon Park.

“No one can know! No one!”

Waylon cringes hard in preparation for the blow –

 _(And am I born to die? To lay this body down? And must my trembling spirit fly in – to a world unknown?_ He’s hysterical. Quietly hysterical. _)_

– that never comes. Blaire looks up. Screams.

The unmistakeable black miasma of the swarm, the Walrider, sweeps into the room, and takes him into the air like a small-minded interventionist God from the machine.

_Do not worship the swarm._

They’d emailed it to all personnel. Because people were worshiping the swarm. Not just the patients and their cult, but people Waylon had worked with. Too close to the engine, maybe, too much staring – God, how long was he out, how long did they make him look? – and they’d be going on about a second coming, about the patients being able to _feel_ it the way a dog reacts before an earthquake comes.

Waylon’s logically-minded. Numerically, rather, and in this case he knows it can be reduced – or elevated – into numbers. The swarm is just machines, born from the strings of 1s and 0s that make up the guts of the Morphogenic Engine, so Waylon never worried about being caught up in the allure of its apparent godliness. It’s technology. Not magic. There was enough delusion in this place outside Murkoff’s over-ambition and the people it exploited; this was just another one for the pile.

Lunchroom chatter once suggested (and Waylon had been eavesdropping, because who ever spoke to him when they weren’t barking orders?) that the modern man, looking at something magical, spiritual, apparitions of God and the like, will view it the same as technology. Anything sufficiently advanced becomes indistinguishable. And who are we to tell one from the other? Victims of our own logic and established postulates.

Waylon has faith (in the spiritual sense) in his numbers and little else. Project Walrider is man-made, not a visitor, not something they uncovered that should never have been touched; it was _made_. Contributing to its making will haunt him until he’s no longer around to be haunted.

So Waylon does not worship the swarm, much in the same way that Waylon does not worship his car’s engine or a butter knife. Technology is not godly.

But, staring up at the riling mass of tiny machines as they enter Jeremy Blaire and blow him to fleshy, wet fragments, Waylon begins to understand the appeal.

He is not afraid in this moment, even if it’s a brief one. Logical fallacy from a desperate mind, but as the blood rains down on him like Exodus his only thought is that he’s been saved. As if the swarm can prioritise, and even then, like it has the presence of mind and bias enough to perform this dashing rescue. He’s crying, silently; grateful _and_ suicidal, on the ground below his redeemer.

His own blood wets the soft inner sides of his fingers where he presses onto the fresh hole / stab wound, hard; having nothing to hold onto but himself.

The swarm begins to coalesce in the doorway, looking like something between black smoke and bird murmation. Waylon defocuses for a second. Tries to move and feels a shock of pain that dizzies him, and when he comes back, he’s in shadow. Floating mid-air, just outside the building, looking down on him, is the shape of a man. The swarm-man seems to eat up the sunlight. He’s pure, solid darkness. A surprisingly slight silhouette, smaller than Waylon himself, yet with the nanite particles dancing all around the doorframe with manic energy, he’s so much bigger. Greater, maybe, is the correct word.

And he says, his voice backed by a thousand echoes of machine fuzz: **_“_ _YOU!”_**

Waylon jolts back at the noise. Creeping away is profoundly useless, but he does anyway, attention flitting rapidly from this dark figure, to the droplet of Jeremy Blaire’s blood that’s found its way into his mouth somehow, to that same man’s _ribcage_ on the ground in front of him, and now he’s hyperventilating. His stance on dying has been fluctuating madly the past minute and a half. Hands up in front of his face, chest heaving like a sick bird, it takes him a beat understand when a balled up mass of the swarm floats towards him and drops something on the ground between his legs.

There’s a light _clunk_ as the object hits the floor, and then the blackness disperses. The camera. Must have dropped on impact. He snatches it up lightning fast, cradling it to his chest.

Swarm-man, still hovering and looking like spectre of death, says in his strange, amplified voice, **_“SORRY. DIDN’T MEAN TO FREAK YOU OUT. NOT TRYING TO HURT YOU HERE.”_**

Which is odd, coming from an apparition of the thing that killed dozens, probably hundreds, of the people in this very building.

Waylon makes a series of flurried blinks at him.

 ** _“LISTEN TO ME,”_** he says. ** _“THE CAMERA. YOU WERE RECORDING?”_**

A nod.

 ** _“YOU HAVE TO TELL THEM. CAN’T LET MURKOFF KEEP NURSING THIS—”_** There’s a loud burst of static, and the figure strains. **_“—FUCK. THIS MACHINE, OR ANYTHING LIKE IT. MADE FROM TORTURE. MORAL SEWAGE. YOU’RE A PATIENT? YOU’D KNOW.”_**

Suddenly Waylon feels buzzing, a tingling on his skin. The swarm gently but firmly lifting him to his feet.

 ** _“TELL THE WORLD,”_** says the swarm-man, with a sweeping gesture to the courtyards. When Waylon stands hesitantly, still staring with wide and dewy eyes, he shouts, ** _“GO!”_**

He’d take off running, if he could. The stab wound he’s clutching has slowed his limp even further. Every step’s another jolt of pain, but he cannot stop now. He’s been redeemed, after all. And he owes it to so many people, he now realises, to live through this.

On the way out, Waylon turns around and signs “Thank you.” Swarm-man probably doesn’t understand. With shaking hands, “Thank you, thank you, thank you,” over and over so that he at knows at least that he’s talking.

How long since he’s felt daylight, truly? The light is so warm on his shoulders.

**Author's Note:**

> Miles, 2 minutes later: Wait no DUDE THAT’S MY CAR—


End file.
